How To Extend The Length Of A Note/Hit Without Using Elastic Audio
- drumaudioediting
- Apr 21
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 28
One of the biggest challenges while editing audio is dealing with rushed performances. This is for the reason that as we manually splice and drag the rushed note a little bit later to line up with the grid, we are left with an empty gap to fill.
Quick heads up: we put together a full PDF guide packed with drum editing hacks — you can check it out here if you want an even deeper dive.
There are two ways to approach this editing dilemma, and also two associated problems that these solutions can cause. Let's quickly look at them:
1) Extend The Note With Elastic Audio
Extending the length of the note before the gap is a quick and easy solution for most novices, by using some form of time-stretching/elastic audio. This form of editing can be beneficial in some scenarios, but generally this isn't the best solution.
This is because timestretching audio causes the wavelength of the note to be shortened or lengthened. It's the wavelength of any piece of audio that dictates it's pitch, so in a nutshell - you are changing the pitch of the note. The more drastically you extend the length of a note, the more it's pitch will change and that's not good news for us editors.
Don't get me wrong, Elastic Audio can be used successfully for certain audio editing scenarios, one of them being electric guitar editing. Also it's important to mention that certain time stretching tools in modern DAW's such as Pro Tools, Logic Pro X and Cubase Pro 14 are getting pretty damn good. The algorithms are gradually improving to the point where the time stretching is having a minimal effect on the pitch of the note. Pro Tools' X-Form algorithm is a great example of this.
2) Drag and Extend The Audio To Fill The Gap
The second and most common editing solution is to click and drag the audio of the quantised note backwards towards the seperation point you created to fill the gap and then repair this with a crossfade. This is simple and effective and it works - however this can cause you problems.
What you are essentially doing here, as you drag the audio file backwards to cover the gap, is creating a point where the audio repeats itself for a slight fraction of a second. This will create a slight 'stutter' in the audio. Similarly to the last point; the bigger the gap to fill, the more the audio file is extended - the bigger the stutter.
If a drum recording performance is pretty solid, these types of editing points will be inaudible to most people. If you find yourself fixing a sloppy drum performance and the hits/notes are being moved by a considerable amount, that's where you start to hear these stutters and glitchy sounds all over the place which will harm the quality of the recording.
The above screenshot shows visually that the edit point will produce a pop/click/glitch. You may be thinking to yourself now "But Eddie, that's why we add crossfades to our edit points"...which is true, but there's a way we can get this edit point to sound cleaner. This editing technique can also help you to extend the length of a snare, tom or bass guitar note with very minimal audio artefacts.
We simply want to make sure that at this edit point the waveforms of both audio files match perfectly at point 0 (the centre line in the middle of the waveform block). See the screenshot below for reference.
You can see how the waveform now looks untouched as if we've pieced both pieces of audio together like a neat jigsaw puzzle. We can use this same editing technique to extended longer notes that perhaps have been rushed also.
For example, you have a longer bass note that rings out, however when the bass comes in at the next bar it comes in way too early. You've tried both editing methods above however time stretching the note makes the bass sound 'off' and manually dragging the audio creates a horrible sounding glitch.
Here's how you can extend the note length:
Step 1 - Seperate the note and drag to it's intended position
Step 2 - Drag the audio back from the quantised note to cover the gap. This is where you're hearing an audio stutter/glitch.
Step 3 - Let's extend the length of the note before the editing point to reduce the amount of duplicate audio and therefore reduce the stutter effect. Pick a point in the middle of the note where the velocity is fairly consistent, and separate it.
Step 4 - Move the section you've just created towards the glitchy edit point to reduce the amount of duplicate audio at that point.
Step 5 - Cover up the gap you've just created by extending the audio file backwards.
Step 6 - As we zoom in on this new edit point where we've extended the bass note, we can see the waveforms don't match up. Using the same technique as we showed you before, we're going to drag the highlighted file backwards to match the waveforms together.
Step 7 - Fit's together just like a jigsaw puzzle!
Step 8 - Let's not forget to add a small crossfade.
You now have yourself a tight and clean sounding edit!
Want to take everything you just learned even further? Check out our full guide — it’s the shortcut we wish we had when I started editing drums years ago.
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